Wild Country Krab issue?

Biners can come unclipped from bolts or backclipping. Design flaw?

Shit happens. Do your best to prevent shit from happening and/or know what to do when it happens.

Hold up there ......from the the title of this post I expected to read about a wild backcountry crab outbreak.....not some sharp 'biner dialogue. Would have been WAAAY more interesting......just saying.

Don't know about the rope, but that's quite a belly.

It scares me to think of how many people just criticize this post.

Yes biners should not be crossloaded, and yes ropes should not cut that easily, but this happened. I am not sure how many people on here have cleaned from hanging anchors (many routes at the Red), but when you do it is sometimes difficult the unweight your slings. Now imagine you have poor holds to use to pull yourself up after you set up your belay/rappel device. The motion of quickly pulling up on the hold while pulling out slack from the atc is what crossloaded the biner, it was not set up to be crossloaded. You are right, this is not an ideal scenario, but it happened.

Oh, and to whoever posted about lowering off an anchor, that is a great way to prematurely wear anchors, way to go.

Aric Datesman wrote:Seriously, Climber Pat? A design flaw? As I asked before, how many times has this issue come up, out of how many carabiners produced and used over several decades? Quite simply the biner got cross loaded, and the OP should have known better than to weight it in that configuration. Hate to step over this line, but you can't design out stupid. No matter what the manufacturers do to make gear idiot-proof, someone will come along with a better idiot.

I am serious. How many of you honestly do not believe that being able to support body weight without damaging the rope with the biner in any orientation is not a requirement? The cross loading danger, in my mind, before this incident, was not that you might cut your rope, but that the biner is weaker and might break in an extreme fall. I suspect most climbers thought the same way or there would be more stories of shredded ropes.

I once saw a movie called 20 Seconds of Joy. One theme of this movie is the physiological reaction of a high risk community to an accident. It boiled down to somebody gets hurt or killed participating in a high risk activity. The rest of the community rationalize the event by saying that he (she) did something wrong, I never do that particular thing wrong, therefore I am safe to continue my participation. It turns out that after an accident the community considers the high risk activity safer than before.

I agree you cannot design out stupid, but informing manufactures and users of problems is still valuable. Manufacturers can design out a little more stupid, and some stupid might learn something. I did, I had not considered that mere body weight could shred my rope. I will be using a keylock locking biners for my belay biner, just in case. Actually, I already was using one designed to prevent cross loading. This is also something to consider for the biners used on your draws, especially alpine draws where they might flop around while leading cross load during a fall, too.

Pajo wrote:Oh, and to whoever posted about lowering off an anchor, that is a great way to prematurely wear anchors, way to go.

Premature wear on the anchors, at RRG, by lowering? Bwahahahaha!

Aric Datesman wrote:Seriously, Climber Pat? A design flaw? As I asked before, how many times has this issue come up, out of how many carabiners produced and used over several decades? Quite simply the biner got cross loaded, and the OP should have known better than to weight it in that configuration. Hate to step over this line, but you can't design out stupid. No matter what the manufacturers do to make gear idiot-proof, someone will come along with a better idiot.

Aric,
I totally agree with you that this is a one-in-a-million and for the most part is a non-issue. But to completely make it sound as if the climber is an idiot is just stroking your ego and pretending this kind of thing can never happen to you if you are just plain attentive and smart enough. There have been times when I've been rapping or belaying and the biner flips and gets cross-loaded. No matter how attentive you are, it will happen eventually. 99.99% of the time, not a problem because you can flip it back while it's not under a load. If you are unlucky enough to have the rope loaded at that moment you will not be able to flip the biner until you unload it. I can especially see this being more likely when doing weight intensive things like rapping with heavy haulbag...Some of the attitudes here are classic cases of "accidents cannot happen to me because I'm just smarter than everyone else". Even if there is no design flaw, I think a better attitude to adopt is to learn from the mistake and let it be a reminder to be extra vigilant and that even then, mishaps can happen to the best of us.

I think the criticism from most of us is not that the climber made a mistake, but that they appeared to blame the manufacturer for their mistake. By the way, I don't think the OP was the climber in question but was just re-posting something they found.